


And Happily Ever After To You, Too

by athousandwinds



Category: Faking It - Jennifer Crusie, Les Misérables - All Media Types, Thursday Next - Jasper Fforde
Genre: Gen, post-The Well of Lost Plots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-23
Updated: 2011-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 00:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/pseuds/athousandwinds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes people are just that annoying. Especially happy people on Valentine's Day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Happily Ever After To You, Too

In my time as Bellman, I've crossed into just about every genre there is, if not every book, and I have to say that nothing is more depressing than hanging out in Romancelandia. _Les Misérables_ is a cakewalk by comparison. At least Cosette's usually cheerful and good for a chat over coffee. (Though there was that one time I had to dissuade her from introducing women's lib into the storyline. Not that I didn't appreciate her efforts to help her mother, but if the book were any longer, a generation of French lit students would end up with back problems).

The trouble with the romance genre is all the happily ever afters floating around, I thought, feeling snappish and tired after a night spent covered in baby vomit. Landen was still eradicated, so visiting a lorryload of novels where the women were invariably well-sated was in no way my idea of a good time.

Naturally, because we were in the BookWorld and there had to be at least one example of dramatic irony per day, I got the call right then that something was gnawing through the happy endings of all the novels round there. Before you get excited, it turned out to be a false alarm.

Still, it meant I had to check on way too many romance novels for my peace of mind. The most popular genre in history and the most reviled, and you can see why. (And it didn't help that quite a few of my agents were in the "most reviled" corner - Emperor Zhark had one of the worst cases of genre snobbery known to mankind, which was a bit rich when you consider that he was sci-fi.) I'd be making my way quite calmly through a Jennifer Crusie when - bam - I'd get blindsided by the hero feeding the heroine doughnuts with his fingers and I'd start remembering that last picnic with Landen. Damn it.

After that, I got Dempsey and Goodnight to do the rest. They were the kind of agents you used sparingly, but in this case they knew their own happily ever after was on the line, too, so I left them to get on with it.

Then I settled down on the couch with Friday tucked under my left arm, and _Vanity Fair_ on my lap. Because sometimes you need a scathingly witty dismissal of love, and that sometimes is usually when everyone around has more of it than you do.


End file.
